The Problem with Incels
Content warnings: discussions of violent thoughts, violent tendencies, and sexual slavery (incels, in other words).

There's been a lot written about the problems of the incels (the "involuntarily celibate") lately. So here's my take on things. The problem with incels isn't that they can't get laid. The problem with the incels is they've convinced themselves they deserve to live a lifestyle where, like baby birds in the nest, everything necessary for their health and happiness is brought to them and shoved down their gob, without them having to lift a finger or exert themselves in the slightest to get any of it.

The problem isn't sex, or lack of access thereunto, because there is already a solution for that particular problem - and it's a solution they don't want to take up. That they'd be getting what they ostensibly argue they're after, which is no-strings-attached sex with someone who is willing to bed them regardless of their physical appearance, is beside the point - they don't want to have to exert themselves in the slightest, in order to get it, and they don't want the slightest chance they could be refused or denied what they think they're entitled to. This is where their elaborate plans to be able to, for example, engage in necrophilia, or to transplant the brain of a dog into the head of a (good looking) woman come from.

Instead, "lack of access to sex"[1] is merely the hook on which they hang their overall resentment at the world. This resentment is largely about the universe not turning out to be exactly like the vision they've been absorbing from various media properties since they were small children. They don't magically get a job for life, or a nice house in the suburbs, much less the "Hollywood homely" wife that comes with them - they have to work for a chance at all of these things, and it isn't fair. Oh, and because they have to work for the chance at them, they're missing out on some of them (because there isn't enough to go around[2]). Which also isn't fair.

Fairness, according to these guys, is apparently a world where they get a house, a job for life, a good car, and a "Hollywood homely" (at minimum) woman handed to them as a reward for... well, apparently for being born. Because they're supposed to be the Chosen Ones, the One True Demographic. The young, white, middle-class, cis-heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian-raised, college-educated men for whom the world was created, and on whose sufferance everyone else is supposed to exist.

If nothing else, they certainly set records in levels of entitlement.

One thing you'll note about their plans, and it's a thing which is common to the plans of a lot of other groups on the conservative far right - there's very little connection between what they say they want, and what they're planning/threatening to do in order to obtain it. They say they want respect, they want somebody to love. Their plans show they want not respect from others, but cringing fear and submission; and when they say they want "somebody to love", they mean "some body to abuse, destroy, debase, depersonalise, de-humanise, disrespect". They don't actually want a girlfriend, much less an actual equal partner in their lives - they want a toy they can destroy in a fit of anger, a punching bag they can fuck, something they can turn into the twisted image of their own shattered self-esteem, in the hope that if they're just able to take someone else low enough, they can build themselves up to the point where they can feel powerful. So their plans are all about destroying, wrecking, killing people until they've got a large enough honour guard to earn them status in hell, if nowhere else. Their language is violent and vicious, dehumanising people who aren't men, people who aren't white, people who aren't them, so they can hold onto the delusion they're the only Real Human Beings on the planet, and that everyone else is stealing their stuff. The crimes they commit are crimes of entitlement.

Therapy might help, but in order for it to do so, they'd have to admit their problems are firstly, their own to resolve; and secondly, soluble in the first place. They'll have to come to a place where their desire to be a man with a girlfriend other men envy them for is not their first and all-consuming thought when they wake up in the morning, and the thing they dream of when they go to sleep at night. Some of them might actually have to learn to reconcile themselves to the idea they might not ever get a girlfriend, and figure out what they're going to do with their lives instead (the way plain, poor girls have had to do for centuries). They might have to reconcile themselves to settling for a second-best partner - someone who genuinely loves them and cares for them, someone who makes them a better person all around, but who won't bring them status (the way plain women have had to do for centuries as well).

In some ways, incels are the victims they see themselves as - they're victims of their own toxic notions of masculinity and what it is to be a man. They're victims of slick charlatans who are exploiting those notions to make money (for example, the pick-up artist community), and at least some of them are almost certainly victims of the sort of giggling sociopath who pushes people into committing atrocities for the fun of it ("for the lulz"). But most of all, they're victims of their own colossal sense of overblown entitlement, and their delusion the world owes them the baby bird lifestyle they crave.

[1] A short clarification here: it's more like "lack of access to sex with the types of women they feel they're entitled to, in a context where the woman isn't allowed to refuse and instead must show a sort of cringing admiration for their every action". The problem is not that sex or women are absolutely unavailable to these guys - the problem for a lot of them is they don't like what's on offer. They're over-entitled and picky, not deprived.[2] Because capitalism.